Charles B. Chang, Ph.D. - US grants

PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT We seek five years of funding to support improvements to the Boston University Conference on Language Development, which will take place at Boston University each year around the first weekend in November. Now in its 41st year, the conference is internationally recognized as one of the most important annual meetings bringing together researchers in different areas of language acquisition and development, including first and second language acquisition, language disorders, bilingualism, and literacy development. The meeting comprises oral presentations and posters selected through peer review, as well as invited keynote and plenary speakers, symposia on topics of current interest, a research funding workshop, and a publisher exhibit. In this proposal, we are requesting funds for two components to the conference that will increase the quality, visibility, interdisciplinary contribution, health relevance, and accessibility to students (especially students from under- represented populations). First, we would like support for a professional development workshop for students and postdocs, bringing in speakers to discuss a variety of important professional development issues. Second, we will offer new travel awards that give priority to students from underrepresented minorities. The BUCLD serves as a prime venue to bring together researchers from all different areas of language development, who do not typically interact or encounter each other's work regularly elsewhere, thus fostering substantial interaction across theoretical and disciplinary boundaries. It also offers excellent training for students and postdocs, both in the form of access to high quality scholarship and in training activities such as an NIH/NSF funding workshop. The two key pieces we seek to add will not only ensure that the BUCLD continues to be a high quality venue for these activities, but will allow the conference to grow in important new directions that are demonstrated priorities for the scientific community as well as NIH.

The Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) will be held at Boston University each November from 2017 through 2021. BUCLD is an internationally recognized meeting of researchers in language acquisition and development, including first and second language acquisition, language disorders, bilingualism, and literacy development. Now in its forty-second year, BUCLD promotes the progress of science by providing a major venue for dissemination of scholarly findings, for initiation and development of collaborations, and for professional networking. The conference consists of approximately 190 presentations selected through peer review, as well as invited keynote and plenary speakers, two symposia on topics of current interest, a research funding workshop, a professionalization workshop for students and postdoctoral scholars, and a publisher exhibit. Attendees number over 500 researchers from around the world, from undergraduates up through senior faculty. Full ASL interpreting coverage is provided throughout the conference, and conference proceedings are published soon after the conference. Since 1976, the faculty and students of Boston University have organized and run the conference; Dr. Charles Chang, Dr. Sudha Arunachalam, and Dr. Paul Hagstrom lead the team of organizers for the 2017 conference.

Funding from the National Science Foundation will support education and enhance accessibility, diversity, and inclusion at BUCLD by subsidizing student travel, including that of underrepresented minorities, and the time of the student organizers of the conference, graduate students in Linguistics and allied fields. Support for student travel will allow student contributions, regularly among the highest-rated abstract submissions, to be presented at the conference without undue hardship and will increase the exposure of students to the top research and researchers in the field in a friendly and interactive environment. Furthermore, support for student organizers will allow BUCLD to continue to play an important role in training students as future professionals, including undergraduates and women.

Language change is a fact of life, and among the various types of sound change, vowel merger has featured particularly prominently in linguistic research. Most research on vowel merger has focused on well-studied Indo-European languages such as English, addressing questions related to the production and/or perception of once-distinct vowels that are becoming less distinct (for example, many speakers of US English no longer produce a distinction between the 'cot' and 'caught' vowels, but some of these speakers can nevertheless perceive the distinction). However, investigating the dynamics of vowel merger in less-studied, and non-Indo-European, languages is important to understanding vowel merger because they often contain vowel features that are absent from well-studied languages and, thus, provide new insights into how vowels can change over time. Using a mixed-methods approach, this project examines a case of vowel merger observed in an under-studied language, which contains a vowel feature absent from Indo-European languages. The findings of the project contribute to scientific knowledge of language variation, contact, and change in a multilingual, understudied society, of the relationship between patterns of language variation and the social and attitudinal associations of speech, and of the basis for identifying vowel mergers in languages with unique vowel features. By collecting speech production and perception data across a range of speaker ages and localities, the project also has implications for speech-language pathology, language pedagogy, speech recognition technologies, and forensic linguistics.<br/><br/>This project explores patterns of variation that have been implicated in previous cases of vowel merger but focusing on a rarer case of vowel merger. In particular, the project examines whether demographic and social factors, such as age, gender, and locality, help predict the extent of merger in this case; whether a vowel merger in production corresponds to one in perception; and whether a vowel merger that is apparent according to the traditional vowel height and vowel backness dimensions also appears consistently in other, less frequently examined acoustic measures. The project addresses these questions by collecting production and perception data from two different communities (urban versus rural), including adolescents (ages 10-18 years), younger adults (19-39 years), and older adults (40+ years). Production data come from conversational interviews and a picture-naming task; perception data come from a listening task. Audio recordings from the production tasks undergo acoustic analyses, which help determine whether there is a vowel merger in production and support exploration of additional diagnostics for vowel merger. Study participants also complete a detailed questionnaire that includes questions about language/dialect contact and language attitudes. The project results form the basis of the first open-access corpus of the language being studied, a tool for language researchers and a source of information about various speech norms in an under-studied language.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.